Summer Enrichment

This seems to be the first official week of summer! Last week found me teaching summer enrichment at St. Albans. The morning class for me was Drama with Mr. Cook. We decided to focus on improvisational acting and Commedia dell'arte in particular. We thought it would be fun to create our own masks, too.
Commedia dell'arte began in Italy in the 14th century. It means "comedy of craft" and focuses on improvisation of reoccurring scenes with stock characters. Traveling acting companies would tour and perform in the countryside. Each actor had a special character they would play, and their masks would be indicative of the personality. The actors were given a basic outline for the scene; from there they would improvise dialogue including jokes and gags.
We had our actors doing the same thing over the course of the week. We discussed how the characters were divided into three groups.
Il Vecchi - (the old men)
These were the Il Dottore (the Doctor), Pantalone (Big Pants), and Il Capitano (the Captain).
Il Zanni (the “zany” servants)
These included characters like Arlecchino or “Harlequin” the tricky servant; Brighella or the “Brawler”, and Columbina the “Little dove” who was the wise-cracking maid.
Gli innamorati - which we call "the lovers". They had names like Flavio and Isabella.

The Il Vecchi would try to keep the lovers apart while the Zanni would just cause trouble.

The kids did a great job with their presentations which I caught on video. I've included some pictures of the morning classes.

In my next post, I'll tell you about the great time I had in my two afternoon classes of "Cunning Creations". I'll include the recipes for making ink, glue, dough, slime, chalk, and a few other fun things we made.

I hope you all are enjoying your summer!

Mrs. Watson